Speaking of parties, I had to quick whip up another tub of pico de gallo for a friend’s 60th birthday yesterday, between bouts of frenzied pixel-pushing, and naturally I was missing a few key ingredients and had no time to leg it to the store. So I subbed a couple jalapeños for the missing serranos and some Deschutes Twilight Summer Ale for the traditional Mexican beer and you know what? It didn’t suck.

But I could do with a break from the kitchen tonight, and thus Herself will be fetching a Luigi’s pizza home after her stint at the local Humane Society, where she spends a couple days each week helping lonesome critters find happy homes.

Un-boxed and assembled my new 29er last week, so, you guessed it – nothing but cold and rain here in Duluth, Mn. First day of summer tomorrow will feature rain and a high of @ 50f. Nice. Got in a couple of short rides though, and the new Shimano 30 speed XT is fabulous!

We’ll venture into the city of Casale Monferrato tonight with our guests to enjoy pizza at a place we like called “Capri”. There must be a zillion places in Italy with this name and this one has the required paintings of scenes from the Amalfi Coast on the walls. But the guys make a darn good pizza there, probably a 7 or 8 on our scale of 10 being the real thing within 50 kms of Napoli. They close up in July and head down to the Amalfi Coast themselves, just to remember how pizza is supposed to be made I guess.
Afterward we’ll walk down the closed-to-autos main street and enjoy some amazing gelato from a place called GROM. There are a few of these places around Italy but the concept originated right here…fresh local ingredients, no preservatives, etc. Kind of the SlowFood concept turned to ice cream. I think they even have a place in NYC now. Some folks will be slow to awaken today as they pedaled 119 kms with 2100 meters of elevation gain yesterday. A full day on the bike, 9 am to 6 pm with a couple hours out of the middle for a proper sit-down lunch. We’ll take it a bit easier today with a shorter and flatter route to our south.